Gottlob Krause’s West-African Food Collection
As an opponent of colonialism and slave trading, German linguist Gottlob Krause (1850-1938) became the enemy of the German government who tried to obtain colonies in Africa. In the 1870’s he was sent to an area in West Africa that was still ‘free’ for foreign domination. When he found out that his linguistic and ethnological research was a cloak for preparing the German colonization of this part of Africa, he immediately refused all cooperation and started publishing articles about the colonial intentions and misbehavior of the Germans in Africa.
In 1888, he returned to Africa, this time as representative of an ivory trading company in Stuttgart, as well as for studying languages and collecting ethnographic objects in Togo, for his own sake.
Needless to say that he did not offer his collection to a German museum. In 1889, the National Museum of Ethnology museum in Leiden bought his collection consisting of 1700 objects. Krause had bought many of his objects at the market in Salaga (Ghana). The edible part of the collection consists of twenty glass bottles filled with a variety of dried beans, rice, vegetables, fruits and flour. The non-preserved, perishable African fruits and vegetables have transformed into moldy and unidentifiable food objects.
Unfortunately, there is little information left about his food collection. After his death in 1938, nobody was interested in his notes and archive. They ended on the scrap heap in Zürich, the city where he past his last years.
